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Quotes by Historian
"My favorite book is the last one printed, which is always better than those that were published earlier."
24
"The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it."
24
"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice."
24
"Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself."
24
"History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."
23
"Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914."
23
"America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair."
22
"There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion."
22
"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle."
22
"It would not be possible to praises nurses too highly."
22
"The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events."
22
"We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway."
22
"Crossing the Penobscot, one found a visible descent in the scale of humanity."
22
"The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."
22
"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play."
22
"Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal."
22
"It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans."
22
"The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation."
21
"Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved."
21
"We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself."
21
"Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will."
21
"My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him."
21
"The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the Netherlands."
21
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